For weeks now, I’ve hesitated to write about technology. Of course, I’m thinking about it. I think we all are. We’re surrounded, bombarded, confused, and caught off guard by technology on a daily basis. We’re watching it change in real-time, chasing after it, and trying to find ways to exist alongside it.
In the past few years, since the rise of influencer culture and AI, I’ve grown rather angry that this version of the world is the one I’ve ended up in. I often yearn for what feels like a simpler time — one with landlines and physical photo albums — and wish that I had grown up then instead. However, I’m here in the Digital Age. And as a young person, I feel directly at the epicentre of it.
When I think back to my childhood, I remember the chunky PCs of our school library and looking up phone numbers in the Yellow Pages. I didn’t have a cell phone until I started high school, and having spent an entire childhood without one, used it solely to take embarrassing selfies and call my parents when I was ready to be picked up. Now, with my phone glued to my hand, I catch myself fighting the urge to use ChatGPT for just about everything. The shift happened so quickly. In a way, I feel like I exist in a generational purgatory — half of my life spent in pioneer times, and the other in a sci-fi, dystopian present. I’m the last of one era, and the first of another.
As these technological advancements progress rapidly, I feel equally terrified and expected to remain on top of them. Despite being among the generation meant to be most proficient in it, I am just as confused by technology as anyone else. The reality is that humanity lived for centuries without technology and access to information. It’s only in the past two decades that we’ve been surrounded by its ever-shifting forms. We’re not only still learning what it is and how to use it — we’re learning what it means to live with it. I tried to explain this to my parents when they asked how to know if a video was AI generated or not.
“I don’t think anyone really knows,” I said.
These confusing times feel reminiscent of my teenage growing pains — when I could tell that things were changing, but didn’t understand them at all. I imagine that similar feelings have arisen before, perhaps alongside the introduction of cars, as people stood with their horses and carriages thinking “it seems too good to be true, so it must be.”
In an attempt to make sense of it all, I stumbled upon a video by Hank Green titled “You’re Not Addicted To Content, You’re Starving For Information.” Though it’s framed as being about technology, Green spends much of the video talking about food and humanity’s relation to it. He discusses how until the 1940s, humans lived with food scarcity, as wars, famines, and food rationing defined our diets. But, as food became more abundant and available — a very new problem for humanity — an array of issues arose. Unprecedented health problems, unhealthy relationships to food, obesity, and extremist dieting cultures riddled a society once malnourished. Worse, corporations began competing against each other, exploiting customers and engineering foods to be hyper-palatable. And naturally, the better the food tasted, the worse it was.
However, in the video Green reminds us that food itself isn’t bad. It sustains us. The challenge is moderation — something we’re still figuring out, 80 years later.
The metaphor for technology is hard to ignore. For centuries, information was scarce. Now in the span of just two decades, it has become overwhelmingly abundant, immediately at our fingertips. Like food, technology is not inherently bad. But the overabundance of information has warped our relationship to it, leaving us overstimulated, addicted, and confused. And just as corporations engineered foods to hook our taste buds, they now optimize digital content, engineering it to be hyper-palatable. The tastier the “digital meal” — the funnier, more addictive, more angering it is— the worse it often is for us.
Just like food, our relationship to technology is still in its awkward adolescence — only we’re decades behind. We’re stumbling through a brand-new world, reminiscing what once was, and unsure of what this abundance will do to us. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m terrified of technology — of the way that it’s rotting my brain, shortening my attention span, and eroding my very human, artistic self. I miss the PCs, iPod shuffles, and ability to leave my phone at home often.
And yet, as I watch the world change, I know that I can’t be terrified forever. We’ve adapted before, and we will again. If technology feels overwhelming now, maybe it’s because it’s simply too soon to understand it fully. What we can do — and what I think we must do — is allow ourselves grace in the confusion and growing pains, and imagine a version of this world made better by technology. One where it supports us instead of consuming us. One where abundance doesn’t mean overload.
I’m grateful I don’t live in the days of horse and carriage, but I don’t want to live as a servant to my phone either. Perhaps one day, either in our generation or the next, we’ll find the balance. But for now, we’re caught between hunger and excess — no longer starving, but learning to live with the feast we asked for.
